Power outage kills Steam for an hour

Steam users experienced an unexpected power outage on Sunday morning. The outage was due to a failure of the UPS in the data center that hosts Steam. Steam support confirmed the outage, but later confirmed that all power is on and service was restored.

The outage affected everything on Steam as well as Valve’s own web site. Value staff were quickly alerted of the problem and responded quickly to work on getting the issue resolved, which explains why the down time was limited to about one hour.

No specifics were announced as to why the UPS failed or what specifically failed in the redundancy plan. Bad weather, however, throughout North America during the recent cold snap has caused a number of issues; and it would appear that Valve was lucky that Steam was offline for such a short period of time.